Monday, June 26, 2017

A careful look at what's missing from the Meeker report (including trust, evidently); a willingness to call out bad behavior in Silicon Valley; areas of impact of AI in healthcare; the end of car ownership; media habits of Gen Y and Gen Z compared; trends on influencer marketing; executives' preference for thought leadership; Amazon may not get away with Whole Foods without a fight; manufacturing trends portend retail trends; original TV programming is coming to social platforms; China bans livestreaming; the impact of Echo on the music industry; the ousting of Travis Kalanick as Uber's CEO and all of the fallout around it; Google Analytics for content marketers; the importance of preparation amid crisis; and more in the inquisitive edition of The Full Monty. Don't forget check out where Brain+Trust is speaking (final section below).

We've got all of these links — and those that didn't make the cut for publication — in The Full Monty Magazine on Flipboard.

Top Stories

Unless you've been sleeping in your cab all week, you're aware that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick resigned. More on the industry fallout in the Regulatory / Security section below.

We all know and trust the annual Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers Internet Trends Report delivered annually by Mary Meeker (as shared in the June 5 edition here). But in a bit of sleuthing, Tom Webster has determined that all may not be as it seems. While the report is exhaustive, Tom found that it's a matter of what isn't there that speaks volumes: namely, that the Meeker report presents data primarily from KPCB portfolio companies, thus assuring that "Internet trends" will be set by the companies that it funds. A clever bit of content marketing. And possibly an ethical morass.

Is Kalanick's ousting at Uber the cultural tipping point that made it safe to address these issues publicly? Given that there was a bit of hesitancy in condemning Caldbeck's behavior publicly until Hoffman spoke out, it seems that the industry still has progress to make.

In the final part of this 9-part series, Christopher Penn concludes that the future of AI in marketing – or many other fields – is bright, but "so are our prospects if we’re willing to adapt and work with the machines, rather than oppose them." It should be augmented intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. Check out the whole series (linked in his article).

AUTONOMOUS

Ride sharing and self-driving vehicles will redefine our relationship with cars, and auto makers and startups alike are gearing up for the change. The Wall Street Journal ran a special section on the Future of Transportation, leading with a rather hyperbolic headline, "The End of Car Ownership."

The Tesla driver involved in a fatal autonomous driving accident ignored repeated warnings to put his hands on the wheel before he crashed into the rear of a semi-trailer, shearing off the top third of his car. According to the NHTSA report, during a 37-minute period when he should have had his hands on the steering wheel, the driver did so for only 25 seconds. We're still not ready for autonomous driving. It's not like ignoring your "check engine" light, folks.

In the Waymo vs. Uber suit, parent company Alphabet claims that Travis Kalanick knew that Otto CEO and former Waymo leader Anthony Lewandowski was in possession of Waymo files five months before Uber acquired Otto. That sounds like grounds for firing—oh, wait...

When it comes to thought leadership, busy executives prefer longer content according to the Deloitte Center for Industry Insights. While it might seem counter-intuitive, it stands to reason that executives might like more demonstrated deeper thinking rather than flash-in-the-pan insights.

As Walmart grows its e-commerce chops, there are struggles with culture assimilation — notably startups learning about Walmart's alcohol-free policies the hard way. While a ban on free alcohol may be a tough pill for some startups to swallow, given the recent spate of questionable behavior across Silicon Valley, perhaps this seasoned view can offer some benefit.

SPONSOR

Register now for Content Marketing World 2017 – taking place September 5-8, 2017 in Cleveland, OH. I’ll be there, and I hope you will be too! Early bird rates end on Friday, June 2. Plus, use code MONTY100to save an additional $100. Register here: http://cmi.media/cmworld17monty

Facebook will launch a standalone app for video creators later this year which features a new suite of tools that Facebook is referring to as its Live Creative Kit, to help creators make their streams look more professional.

ALPHABET / GOOGLE

At VidCon, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki made a number of announcements about YouTube users and products. Those included: 1.5 billion logged-in viewers visit YouTube each month and viewers watch an average of 1 hour a day; YouTube TV will expand to 10 markets; and there's a new look coming for desktop and mobile.

If you work for a brand and would like to know about some of the key developments in video technology, shooting and editing techniques, and examples of social video campaigns, check out this brands' guide to social video.

AUDIO

Pandora CEO Tim Westergren is stepping down. The company does not have a replacement planned. This comes at a critical time, as the company looks to maintain its market lead over Spotify and with the recent investment by Sirius XM.

Contrast that with these 10 famous book hoarders. An old colleauge once said that his book collecting habit had all of the discernment of a vacuum cleaner, owing to the fact that he was "more of a book accumulator than a book collector."

Brain+Trust Partners doesn't believe in gobbledygook — we use common sense strategic guidance to help you master the evolving marketplace. From strategy development to technology and data vendor selection, to digital transformation and streamlining processes, our focus is on the customer experience. And our decades of experience working for major brands means that we deeply understand the challenges you're facing. Let us know if we can help you.

Monday, June 19, 2017

Google and Facebook are stepping up their roles in combating terrorism and fake news; Amazon gets primed for Whole Foods; the state of the chatbot economy; using bots to build relationships; email and content marketing are essential to each other; trusted news sites and ads pair well; the three forces at play against brick-and-mortar retailers; report: how propagandists abuse the Internet; Instagram gives influencers tools to better disclose paid relationships; YouTube is heatmapping VR; Netflix has surpassed cable subscriptions; Spotify is more popular than ever and losing money; Airbnb wants more uniformity; Lyft is gaining on Uber; the fallout from the report on the investigation of Uber's culture; pressure is mounting to measure marketing's impact and performance; leadership titles matter less than you think; and more in the disruption edition of The Full Monty. Be sure you subscribe to The Full Monty podcast, and don't forget check out where Brain+Trust is speaking (final section below).

Check out exactly how to become a patron to show that you care about great content.

We've got all of these links — and those that didn't make the cut for publication — in The Full Monty Magazine on Flipboard.

Top News

Two moves by Google and Facebook — leaders of the online world — indicate their willingness to take responsibility for solving some of the most thorny issues we're dealing with as a society:

Following Sunday's terrorist attack in London, Google announced "We are working with government, law enforcement and civil society groups to tackle the problem of violent extremism online," specifically through four steps it is taking to fight online terror:

Devote more engineering resources to apply the most advanced machine learning research to train new “content classifiers” to help more quickly identify and remove extremist and terrorism-related content.

Greatly increase the number of independent experts in YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program and expand their work with counter-extremist groups to help identify content that may be being used to radicalize and recruit extremists.

Videos that contain inflammatory religious or supremacist content will appear behind an interstitial warning and will not be monetized, recommended or eligible for comments or user endorsements.

Implement the “Redirect Method” more broadly across Europe, harnessing the power of targeted online advertising to reach potential ISIS recruits, and redirect them towards anti-terrorist videos that can change their minds about joining.

Last week, Facebook solicited feedback on the toughest issues it is grappling with, publishing a list of seven “hard questions” (such as its role amid terrorism, how to define false news versus politicized speech) and an email address — hardquestions@fb.com — where users can send feedback and suggestions for more questions the company should address.

Facebook is building bots that are becoming more human, gaining the ability to negotiate and plan ahead like people. I may make my teenager talk to Messenger the next time he wants something.

With the conversational intelligence capabilities available today, it’s finally possible for every brand to take the customer on a digital journey that builds a relationship rather than merely executing a siloed, standard transaction, according to Ben Lamm of Conversable.

And Amazon has filed a patent on technology that prevents people from doing online price comparisons while in its stores. The system would intercept certain URLs, search terms, and other web activity that takes place on its in-store Wi-Fi. That's right. The brand that helped coin the term 'showrooming' objects to showrooming in its own stores. Quick: look up the price of irony.

SPONSOR

Register now for Content Marketing World 2017 – taking place September 5-8, 2017 in Cleveland, OH. I’ll be there, and I hope you will be too! Early bird rates end on Friday, June 2. Plus, use code MONTY100to save an additional $100. Register here: http://cmi.media/cmworld17monty

Only 50 million of those 140 million Spotify listeners are paying subscribers, leading to that widening loss. Spotify's fans are loving it to death. It may be time to consider raising the price of a subscription.

Program of the Week: Following the mention of Augustus Caesar in the This Week in Fake News section above, this week's program is The Life of Caesar(s). It started as a linear, relatively serious podcast about the life of Gaius Julius Caesar, the general, the consul, the dictator. Fairly quickly it morphed into an over-the-top, balls to the wall version of the same podcast, replete with potty mouths, rock songs, and political rants. Do you have a program to recommend? Add yours to our Google Sheet: smonty.co/yourpodcasts.

The bottom line is, there's one way to fix what's wrong at Uber: think twice before using Uber. What are your other options? Lyft? Traditional taxi? You're aware of the issues at stake and what you're supporting.

Measurement / Analytics / Data

The future is not in plastics, but in data. Those who know how to measure and analyze it will rule the world.

Pressure is mounting on marketers to measure marketing's performance and impact. Currently, an MPM study finds that marketing is doing best at using data in order to improve its effectiveness, but is having less success in using data to make course adjustments and improve operational efficiency.

Mental Nourishment

Other links to help you reflect, improve, or simply learn something new.

Shane Parrish writes on Farnam Street: People Don't Follow Titles: Necessity and Sufficiency in Leadership. “Titles often come with the assumption people will follow you based on a title. Whether by election, appointment, or divine right, at some point you were officially put in the position. But leadership is based on more than just titles... A necessary condition for leadership is trust, which doesn't come from titles. You have to earn it.”

Brain+Trust Partners doesn't believe in gobbledygook — we use common sense strategic guidance to help you master the evolving marketplace. From strategy development to technology and data vendor selection, to digital transformation and streamlining processes, our focus is on the customer experience. And our decades of experience working for major brands means that we deeply understand the challenges you're facing. Let us know if we can help you.

Monday, June 12, 2017

It's just another week at Uber; Alphabet says 'domo arigato, Mr. Roboto'; AI for marketers is really hard; Lyft is getting serious about autonomous vehicles; lessons from the WSJ's paywall; the positive (and negative) about thought leadership in B2B settings; Amazon battles Walmart; Twitter's live video success; the danger of posting to a Facebook Group; one app accounts for 30 percent of mobile usage in China; streaming services surpass cable; news radio listening is on the rise; Instagram is being used for malware; more efficient marketing through untapped data; the role of the CEO in transformation; and more in the Uber emergency board meeting edition of The Full Monty. Be sure you subscribe to The Full Monty podcast, and don't forget check out where Brain+Trust is speaking (final section below).

THIS WEEK IN RETAIL:

It’s been a tough week for the retail industry, with more than 1,000 stores closing their doors for good. Luxury retailer Michael Kors announced it would be closing over 100 locations, and electronics giant Radio Shack closed 1,000 locations across America.

Amazon is going after Walmart with a 45% discount on Prime for lower-income customers. This shows how much Walmart has been able to put Amazon on notice with its recent moves. No word on whether Amazon will accept the same variety of payments that Walmart does, though.

SPONSOR

Register now for Content Marketing World 2017 – taking place September 5-8, 2017 in Cleveland, OH. I’ll be there, and I hope you will be too! Early bird rates end on Friday, June 2. Plus, use code MONTY100to save an additional $100. Register here: http://cmi.media/cmworld17monty

TWITTER / PERISCOPE

A new bot account has taken off in popularity, giving the President's thoughtful and considered tweets "the honor they deserve." @RealPressSecBot puts all of the tweets of @realdonaldtrump into this format:

A Facebook Group called "Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens" contained a number of questionable discussion topics, including child abuse, sexual assault, racism, and the Holocaust. And 10 members of the group who had been accepted to Harvard saw their offers rescinded. They probably didn't fully appreciate the irony of it happening via the platform that was created by former Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg.

ALPHABET / GOOGLE

Google AMP pages were meant to speed up the web, but what's actually happening is that users are spending more time on pages. Chartbeat shows that it is having an impact on how users interact with sites.

Google got plaudits for creating an ad blocking system within Chrome, but now it's catching heat for still tracking user behavior and data. While idealists would like complete privacy, it's unrealistic to expect that Google gives up tracking user data, as that's exactly the information that gives it the ability to advertise.

SNAP

Snap just acquired Placed, a company that tracks whether online ads actually lead to offline purchases. This is the kind of insight that Snapchat needs to attract advertisers.

Media

The latest in the world of streaming video, audio, and the advertising, pricing and bundling models related to them.

VIDEO

In a study by Fluent, researchers found that streaming video has surpassed cable. The survey found that 67% of US internet users watch or have access to a streaming service, while just 61% have cable in their homes.

AUDIO

There's been a surge in news radio listening. According to Nielsen, Americans listened to more than 11.5 billion hours of news on the radio last year, up from 10.5 billion in 2015, in particular driven by younger audiences.

New discovery service PodSearch allows podcasts to be listed (for a fee) and for listeners to discover podcast (for free).

Now that Taylor Swift's "1989" has sold 10 million copies, she "wants to thank her fans by making her entire back catalog available to all streaming services." So much for “I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists and creators of this music.” Also of note for the cynics out there: she made her announcement the day before Katy Perry was set to release a new album.

Program of the Week:The Dollop with comedians Gareth Reynolds and Dave Anthony. It explores one small topic or person from American history. Do you have a program to recommend? Add yours to our Google Sheet: smonty.co/yourpodcasts.

If you're seeing this, maybe you'd like to see your company's name here too. Let us know.

Regulatory / Security

Business disruptions in the legal, regulatory, and computer security fields, from hacking to the on-demand economy and more.

SECURITY / HACKING:

A comment in Britney Spears' Instagram account included Russian malware. This isn't just isolated to Spears' account; it's a new trick designed to get the malware in touch with its controllers and is peppered throughout Instagram.

Your company's biggest security threat may be bored employees. When they become distracted at work, they are more likely to be the cause of human error and a potential security risk. Quick! Forward them a copy of this newsletter to keep them occupied.

Chicago cabbies say that the taxi industry is teetering on the verge of collapse. About 42% of Chicago’s taxi fleet was not operating in the month of March, and cabbies have seen their revenue slide for their long-beleaguered industry by nearly 40% over the last three years as riders are increasingly ditching cabs for ride-hailing apps Uber, Lyft and Via, according to a study released Monday by the Chicago cab drivers union.

THIS WEEK IN #DELETEUBER

We're giving Uber its own section this week because the developments have been many and are fairly significant, in terms of understanding startup culture.

If you haven't been following all of the Uber developments (we've chronicled them on The Full Monty, but haven't made a significant update since August 2016), you're in luck. Episode #271 of The Dollop has a fun and horrifying rundown of the history of Uber and its ethically-challenged behavior:

Brain+Trust Partners doesn't believe in gobbledygook — we use common sense strategic guidance to help you master the evolving marketplace. From strategy development to technology and data vendor selection, to digital transformation and streamlining processes, our focus is on the customer experience. And our decades of experience working for major brands means that we deeply understand the challenges you're facing. Let us know if we can help you.